noopm - Slashdot User

Submission + - Analog TV cards banned by FCC as of yesterday

Submitted by

Anonymous Coward

on Friday March 02, 2007 @08:05PM

Anonymous Coward writes: "Beginning yesterday, the FCC requirement went in to effect that 'All TV receiving devices sold must possess the capability of supporting digital television signals.' NVidia has already discontinued their fairly new and very popular DualTV MCE (http://www.nvidia.com/page/dualtvmce.html) card, and soon all Non-ATSC cards will be gone from shelves and available only on Ebay."

Submission + - "Conservapedia" claims to fight Wikipedia

Submitted by

Ellis D. Tripp

on Friday March 02, 2007 @07:46PM

Ellis D. Tripp writes: "A group of religious right activists has launched "Conservapedia" in an attempt to counter the perceived "liberal bias" in the Wikipedia. A few examples of the "corrections":

Dinosaurs
Wikipedia
"Vertebrate animals that dominated terrestrial ecosystems for over 160m years, first appearing approximately 230m years ago."

Conservapedia
"They are mentioned in numerous places throughout the Good Book. For example, the behemoth in Job and the leviathan in Isaiah are almost certainly references to dinosaurs."

US Democratic party
Wikipedia
"The party advocates civil liberties, social freedoms, equal rights, equal opportunity, fiscal responsibility, and a free enterprise system tempered by government intervention."

Conservapedia
"The Democrat voting record reveals a true agenda of cowering to terrorism, treasonous anti-Americanism, and contempt for America's founding principles."

Article here:

http://www.mg.co.za/articlepage.aspx?area=/breakin g_news/breaking_news__international_news/&articlei d=300812

Site here:

http://www.conservapedia.com/"

Submission + - WordPress 2.1.1 Download Compromised; Upgrade ASAP

Submitted by

Kelson

on Friday March 02, 2007 @07:40PM

Kelson writes: "WordPress developers have announced that sometime within the last few days, the download files for WordPress version 2.1.1 were compromised and remotely exploitable code was added.

It was determined that a cracker had gained user-level access to one of the servers that powers wordpress.org, and had used that access to modify the download file. We have locked down that server for further forensics, but at this time it appears that the 2.1.1 download was the only thing touched by the attack. They modified two files in WP to include code that would allow for remote PHP execution.

The Subversion repository is clean, and WordPress has released a 2.1.2 version with additional fixes (including, judging by the diffs, a fix for a cross-site scripting vulnerability discovered a few days ago). Anyone running 2.1.1, especially if you downloaded it within the past few days, is encouraged to upgrade immediately."

Comment Parallels in the US Situation /Broken NYTimes Link (Score 1) 168

by noopm on Monday February 26, 2007 @08:00PM (#18160796) Attached to: British Government Slashes Scientific Research

Hate to be replying to my own post... however, the link to the NYtimes article regarding science funding in the US can be read without registration/TimesSelect only via the following link

Honeynet Delineates Web Application Threats 40

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @11:08PM from the spider-to-fly dept.

An anonymous reader sends us to a technical white paper written by the Honeynet Project & Research Alliance: Know Your Enemy: Web Application Threats. Based on analysis of malware collected by the project, the paper outlines a number of HTTP-based attacks against web applications and some ways of protecting Web servers. Included are code injection, remote code-inclusion, SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and exploitation of the PHPShell application.

Merck To Halt Lobbying For Vaccine 544

Posted by kdawson on Sunday February 25, 2007 @12:12AM from the get-that-needle-away-from-me dept.

theodp writes "Reacting to a furor from some parents, advocacy groups, and public health experts, Merck said yesterday that it would stop lobbying state legislatures to require the use of its new cervical cancer vaccine Gardasil, which acts against strains of the sexually-transmitted human papilloma virus. The $400, 3-shot regimen was approved by the FDA in June. Later that month, a federal advisory panel recommended that females 11-26 years old be vaccinated. The governor of Texas has already signed an executive order making its use mandatory for schoolgirls."

Bionic Eye Could Restore Vision 167

Posted by Zonk on Friday February 16, 2007 @07:15PM from the we-have-the-technology dept.

MattSparkes writes "A new bionic eye could restore vision to the profoundly blind. A prototype was tested on six patients and 'within a few weeks all could detect light, identify objects and even perceive motion again. For one patient, this was the first time he had seen anything in half a century.' The user wears a pair of glasses that contain a miniature camera and that wirelessly transmits video to a cellphone-sized computer in the wearer's pocket. This computer processes the image information and wirelessly transmits it to a tiny electronic receiver implanted in the wearer's head."

Submission + - Full Color Holograms Containing 8 second videos

Submitted by

Andy

on Friday February 16, 2007 @07:13PM

Andy writes: "Check out http://www.xyzrgb.com/holos/soccer.html to see this really cool poster that has a hologram that is not only in full color but contains 8 seconds of video(think of the pictures in the newspapers on the Harry Potter movies). Look here http://www.posterwire.com/ for more information about it."

Submission + - Interview: oldschool BSD hacker Sam Leffler

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 16, 2007 @07:08PM

An anonymous reader writes: In this interview, Sam Leffler, current director of the FreeBSD Foundation and one of the UC Berkeley CSRG hackers who worked on the original BSD operating system, talks about what the Foundation does, upcoming networking features in FreeBSD, and how Apple contributes to the team's work.

Submission + - More Martian Water Evidence

Submitted by tubapro12 on Friday February 16, 2007 @06:42PM

tubapro12 writes: NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has detected light-toned bedrock on Mars occurring in an alternating pattern with darker bedrock within a rift valley. Researchers at the University of Arizona point to this as a product of a liquid, probably water, passing through the rocks.

"On Earth, bleaching of rock surrounding a fracture is a clear indication of chemical interactions between fluids circulating within the fracture and the host rock," Okubo and co-author Alfred S. McEwen reported in the paper. The researchers also said that layered outcrops can indicate cycles with materials deposited by regular episodes of water, wind or volcanic activity.

Submission + - Why Geeks Make Good Lovers

Submitted by

stego

on Friday February 16, 2007 @06:18PM

stego writes: "Justin at Awkward Things I Say To Girls provides good evidence in Why Geeks Make Good Lovers that "that geeks, along with nerds and other peoples who overinvest in intelligence but boast underdeveloped social skills, make the best lovers""

Submission + - Smokers may be the weak IT security link

Submitted by

BobB

on Friday February 16, 2007 @05:52PM

BobB writes: "Where there's smoke, there's a door. A U.K. security company is warning that smokers may impact IT security, leaving open doors that could let in intruders who could abuse a company's network. It may sound slightly far-fetched. But a penetration tester from NTA Monitor Ltd., a company based in Rochester, England, gained access to a professional services company outside London that way. http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/021607-smoke rs-may-be-the-weak.html"

Google Launches Summer of Code 2007 74

Posted by CowboyNeal on Friday February 16, 2007 @05:05AM from the back-once-again dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Looks like Google has announced that it will be doing Summer of Code again this year. The program looks pretty much the same this year but they have built time into the program schedule for students to get up to speed before they start coding. Nice job, Google."

Submission + - Malicious Websites Can Subvert Personal Routers

Submitted by Apro+im on Thursday February 15, 2007 @06:25PM

Apro+im writes: PCWorld is reporting: "If you haven't changed the default password on your home router, do so now. That's what researchers at Symantec and Indiana University are saying, after publishing the results of tests that show how attackers could take over your home router using malicious JavaScript code."

The root of the problem seems to stem from routers allowing GET requests to have side-effects, allowing attackers to change settings and then perform man-in-the middle attacks. Though the story and the linked paper (PDF) claim that routers with changed passwords are immune, a quick experiment shows that routers which use HTTP Authentication can be compromised the same way, if the user has logged into their router earlier in the browser session. Also, though the article says this is a Javascript exploit, it can actually be executed by any tag which allows the inclusion of a "src" element from another domain (e.g., "img").

1 Million OLPCs Already On Order 158

Posted by Zonk on Thursday February 15, 2007 @05:22PM from the lots-of-happy-kids dept.

alphadogg writes "Quanta Computer has confirmed orders for 1 million notebook PCs for the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. The article goes into some background on the project, and lays out the enthusiastic adoption that the project is seeing overseas. The company estimates they'll ship somewhere between 5 and 10 Million units this year, with 7 countries already signed up to receive units. The machines currently cost $130, but with that kind of volume the original goal of $100 a machine may be viable. Even with the low cost, Quanta expects to make a small profit on each machine, making charity work that much easier."

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